Archive for the ‘Food’ tag

Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a quandary, as they are forced to choose between growing more crops to feed an expanding population or preserving their already scant supply of water.

Food production is related to water because food does not grow without water. Since a little while rising food prices are on my radar screen. At first I thought, wow finally somebody (the UN and media covering the story, MSNBC, f.ex.) is talking about it. Then I saw another hockey stick curve, and those sure attract attention, not only since Al Gore’s talk. Then I saw this news-site, telling me how food is rationed in the US. This was the point when I decided to dig a little deeper — why is food getting more expensive?

Can somebody explain to me why on a global scale food is getting a) short and b) expensive right now? I’ve googled a bit, but I didn’t find a thing that would have helped me to understand. What’s behind this? Creating artificial shortages by companies with the goal of increase profits? An ecologic problem?

The funny thing is, you can read all those great resources, but I can still not find the real reason, or a real reason for that matter.

It seems to me if it was just population growth and hence more people eating more meat (“western standard”), then the cost increase for wheat would have been not that abrupt.

I also don’t think that the single reason for cost increase is farmers converting their crops to “bio-fuel”, because I think this is a western (US, and Europe to some extent) phenomenon, and prices also increase in other food-producing countries.

Is it a water distribution problem? Generally, there is enough water in the US and Europe for farming. Granted, some of the farming practices in the US (Mid-West or California) are not vastly sustainable, but generally there is water.

Is it a climate change phenomenon — were there any severely bad harvests on a global scale last year (due to extreme weather conditions happening)?

The food-companies are mentioned sometimes, but are also not linked conclusively to the recent cost-increase.

All in all, there seem to be a variety of reasons. Has the sum of all of them been enough to reach the “tipping point”? But, it seems to me, we are missing something! So I’m asking the same question as Don did, again: What is it?

Food Is the New Crisis

How Streams Really Flow

This is something for you Ben, and all the stream morphologists out there! The lesson is for all of us though: Don’t trust anything (obviously). Also, humans have been around for longer than we sometimes think. This one is not so obvious sometimes. There is a scene in “Elizabeth the Golden Age” that reminded me of that: The Spaniards needed lots of lumber for their seriously big fleet. Very similarly, the ancient Greeks needed lots of lumber for their Triremes. The effects of those needs are still quite visible in the landscape around Seville and on the Peloponnese.

Google to Outspend US Government on Environment

This headline from a blogpost by planetsave caught my eye. Well, that’s the purpose of a headline. Planetsave goes on to tell us how many startup-funding google does. How nice. At the bottom of that post they link to three other posts on environment-parts of the US budget (1, 2, 3).